פירוש על במדבר 32:5

ויאמרו…יתן את הארץ הזאת, They said:…"may this land be given to us." The word ויאמרו is necessary here although nobody had interrupted the spokesmen of the tribes of Gad and Reuven as yet. The Torah wanted to show by interposing this word that only now did these spokesmen address themselves to the real reason why they wanted just these lands. They did not say to Moses: תתן, "give," but יותן, "may it be given." The reason they formulated the request thus was because they were aware that it was not within Moses' authority alone to grant their wish, as we have already explained. They may have given Moses the option to allocate the land to them single-handedly seeing he was the king, or after consulting with Eleazar and the princes.

V. 5. ויאמרו. Diese wiederholte Aufnahme der Anrede setzt eine Pause voraus und zeigt, dass sie selbst nicht ganz frei von dem Bedenken waren, wie ihr Antrag aufgenommen werden würde. Sie bedurften einer Pause, um sich zur Fortsetzung des Vorbringens ihres Anliegens zu sammeln.

אל תעברנו את הירדן, "do not make us cross the Jordan." Baba Batra 109 explains the meaning of the word העבר as being similar to the same word in Numbers 27,8: והעברתם את נחלתו לבתו, "you will transfer his inheritance to his daughter." It means that the daughter transfers the inheritance from its original place. The two tribes implied that if Moses were not to grant their request he would in fact transfer their rightful inheritance from its proper place.

They also intended to remove from themselves the suspicion that they chose this land in order to live more tranquilly and not enter the land of their enemies. This is why they explained that the reason they saw no point in crossing the Jordan was only that they did not stake a claim to any part of the land across the river. They were not motivated by a desire to escape their duty to take part in the war of conquest.

They even implied that the fact that they would not cross the Jordan enabled all the other tribes to each receive larger slices of land than they would have received if they had to parcel it out amongst 12 tribes.

It is also possible that they meant that no useful purpose would be served by their crossing the Jordan seeing G'd would do the fighting that had to be done anyway.